This week members of our engineering team have been installing telescopes at our Sutherland site, South Africa. We are pleased to announce the first of the 3 telescopes to be installed achieved first light on 22 February 2013.

An asteroid with an orbit that brings it very close to the Earth this week, with it's closest approach on 15 February at 20:00 UT. For the past couple of weeks staff astronomer, Tim Lister and I have been trying to image this asteroid, called 2012 DA14.

A heatwave in New South Wales, Australia last week pushed daytime temperatures to as high as 42 degrees Celsius (108 Fahrenheit) and triggered a series of wildfires. One of these, the Wambelong Fire, burned through portions of the Warrumbungle National Park and threatened the Siding Spring Observatory where a large share of the astronomy in Australia is conducted.

Semester dates and deadline

This weekend Siding Spring observatory has been ravaged by a bush fire. All of the telescopes (including Faulkes Telescope South and our other instrumenation) appear to be safe. The New South Wales Fire Service used the LCOGT webcams to investigate the extent of the fires.

LCOGT scientists are attending the winter 2013 meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Long Beach, CA. In addition to several poster and oral presentations, LCOGT will be hosting a booth in the conference hall all week.